Development containers documentation and specification page.

Quickly add a language/tool/CLI to a development container. 'Features' are self-contained units of installation code and development container configuration.

Features are referenced in a user’s devcontainer.json under the top level features object. A user can specify an arbitrary number of Features. At build time, these Features will be installed in an order defined by a combination of the installation order rules and implementation. A single Feature is provided as a key/value pair, where the key is the Feature identifier, and the value is an object containing “options” (or empty for “default”).

September 15, 2022 - Features are self-contained units of installation code, container configuration, and/or settings and extensions designed to enable new development capabilities in your dev container.

December 31, 2025 - Learn how to develop and publish custom Dev Container Features for VS Code, using the Amazon Q CLI feature as a practical example. Includes forking, feature creation, publishing to GHCR, and submitting to the official features index. Tagged with devcontainer, vscode, github, features.

The version property in the respective devcontainer-feature.json file is parsed to determine if the Feature should be republished. Tooling that handles publishing Features will not republish Features if that exact version has already been published; however, tooling must republish major and minor versions in accordance with the semver specification. Features are distributed as tarballs. The tarball contains the entire contents of the Feature sub-directory, including the devcontainer-feature.json, install.sh, and any other files in the directory.

The Rocker Project provides some Dev Container Features for installing R or installing software often used with R.

June 19, 2024 - I found it necessary to use the “ubuntu” tag, and I suspect this is related to this link. Under features, two features are included. The first ensures the latest version of git is installed in the container.

November 3, 2021 - The VS Code window (instance) will reload, clone the source code, and start building the dev container. A progress notification provides status updates. If you pasted in a GitHub pull request URL in step 2, the PR will be automatically checked out and the GitHub Pull Requests extension will be installed in the container. The extension provides additional PR related features like a PR explorer, interacting with PR comments inline, and status bar visibility.

January 21, 2023 - One of the best additions to the dev container specification was the introduction of Features. If you’re not familiar with this functionality, it provides a self-contained way to simplify setup. They make it easier to distribute self-contained packages with container configurations, settings, extensions, and installation code.

June 14, 2023 - The flexibility of Features has enabled a wide variety of use cases, from installing a single tool to setting up specific aspects of a project’s development environment that can be shared across repositories. To that effect, many different patterns for Feature authorship have emerged, and the core team has learned a lot about what works well and what doesn’t.

Coder automatically discovers dev container configurations in your repositories and displays them in your workspace dashboard. From there, you can start a dev container with a single click. Coder detects dev container configurations and displays them with a Start button

October 2, 2025 - Aspire streamlines your development workflow with code-first control, modularity, and observability for distributed applications.

Claude Code installs into any dev container through the Claude Code Dev Container Feature. The settings work with any tool that supports the Dev Containers spec, such as VS Code, GitHub Codespaces, or JetBrains IDEs. The steps below use VS Code as an example.

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January 14, 2024 - A Docker container image is a lightweight, standalone, executable package of software that includes everything needed to run an application: code, runtime, system tools, system libraries and settings · And that's where dev-containers come into the picture, dev-containers provide you a way to build and run your dev environment inside a container.

Yet, this still allows you to customize ... the container, without needing to update CI images to reflect your local modifications. ... Once the base image from the target stage is built, the supporting tool or service may then add additional layers to the image, such as installing additional features or customizations. For VS Code, this also includes some fancy file caching for any extensions to install later. Once this custom image is built, it is then used to start the dev ...

October 23, 2024 - Each Dev Container is fully isolated from your operating system, facilitating experimentation with new tools and technologies without affecting the settings or compatibility of your current tooling.

June 1, 2023 - Features are somewhat different. While they operate on the container, the dev container CLI is ultimately responsible for handling the process. The teams behind these tools have put significant effort into trying to ensure that Feature layers are cached when they are run.

For more information about rebuilding your container, see Applying configuration changes to a codespace. Features are self-contained units of installation code and dev container configuration, designed to work across a wide range of base container ...